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10 World-Changing Innovators for 2012

Tires that maintain their own air pressure. A brain-to-computer interface. Cameras that can see around corners. This year's Breakthrough Award-winning innovators are the brains and sweat behind some of the world's biggest ideas.

Tires that maintain their own air pressure. A brain-to-computer interface. Cameras that can see around corners. This year's Breakthrough Award-winning innovators are the brains and sweat behind some of the world's biggest ideas. (And check out all our Breakthrough coverage here.)

Elon Musk, the entrepreneur, is having a good year. His companies, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Tesla Motors, both hit historic milestones. SpaceX became the first private company to build, launch, and operate a spacecraft that docked with the International Space Station. Tesla unveiled the world's first premium all—electric sedan to positive reviews at a price of $49,900 (after rebate).

Elon Musk, the man, has every reason to be nervous. At 41, the South African-born billionaire has staked his fortune on businesses that could reshape the future—or implode spectacularly. After creating and selling the Internet payment system PayPal, Musk turned his attention to industries he felt could enhance humanity's potential: electric cars and affordable spaceflight.

In 1998 Musk co-founded the Internet payment service PayPal. The new company created a secure transactional platform that avoided the hassle and high fees of traditional credit card accounts, democratizing commerce for online auctions. Ebay bought the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

Big Auto

Since his college days in the mid-1990s, Musk has wanted to kickstart the development of electric cars. In 2003 he co-founded Tesla Motors with an investment of $37 million. The small startup trailblazed the use of lithium-ion batteries in cars; automotive giants like General Motors soon followed suit in cars such as the Volt.

The Spaceflight Industry

In the post-shuttle era, NASA has looked to outside companies to design and build spacecraft for the next era of exploration. Musk's Space Exploration Technologies responded with rockets and vehicles that are far less expensive than anything the space agency has ever flown.

What is it? A team led by Massimo Di Giacomo Russo and John Kotanides Jr. of Goodyear Research has created a tire that manages its own pressure. That means no monthly trips to the filling station to bump up the psi.

How does it work? A peristaltic pump pushes air through a tube wrapped around the tire's interior circumference—the action is similar to the way contracting muscles move food through the human intestine. The weight of the car pinches the rotating tube, forcing tiny gulps of air inside.

Why does it matter? Properly inflated tires will improve the average vehicle's fuel efficiency by 2 to 3 percent, the equivalent of saving about 10 cents per gallon of fuel. Fully inflated tires also last longer and perform better, especially while cornering, which reduces accidents. These tires are coming soon: Goodyear has successfully tested prototypes and hopes to begin limited field testing in the fall of 2013.

Intake Air enters the straw-size tube through a small intake/outlet valve, just above the tire's bead. The vehicle's weight pinches the tube shut.

Inflate As the tire rolls, air is forced toward an internal regulator valve. If tire pressure is low, the valve opens and air is pumped in.

Exhaust Once pressure equalizes, the regulator valve closes and excess air escapes through the intake/outlet valve.

Cody Pickens

3 of 10

Teaching Robots to Walk

MABEL

Innovators: Jessy Grizzle, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Jonathan Hurst, Oregon State University

Walking, that fundamental human activity, seems simple: Take one foot, put it in front of the other; repeat. But to scientists, bipedalism is still largely a mystery, involving a symphony of sensory input (from legs, eyes, and inner ear), voluntary and involuntary neural commands, and the synchronized pumping of muscles hinged by tendons to a frame that must balance in an upright position. That makes building a robot that can stand up and walk in a world built for humans deeply difficult.

But it's not impossible. Robots such as Honda's ASIMO have been shuffling along on two feet for more than a decade, but the slow, clumsy performance of these machines is a far cry from the human gait. Jessy Grizzle of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Jonathan Hurst of Oregon State University have created a better bot, a 150-pound two-legged automaton named MABEL that can walk with a surprisingly human dexterity. MABEL is built to walk blindly (without the aid of laser scanners or other optical technologies) and fast (it can run a 9—minute mile). To navigate its environment, MABEL uses contact switches on its "feet" that send sensory feedback to a computer. "When MABEL steps off an 8-inch ledge, as soon as its foot touches the floor, the robot can calculate more quickly and more accurately than a human the exact position of its body," explains Grizzle. MABEL uses passive dynamics to walk efficiently—storing and releasing energy in fiberglass springs—rather than fighting its own momentum with its electric motors.

The quest for walking robots is not purely academic. The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster highlighted the need for machines that could operate in hazardous, unpredictable environments that would stop wheeled and even tracked vehicles. Grizzle and Hurst are already working on MABEL's successor, a lighter, faster model named ATRIAS. But there's still plenty of engineering to be done before walking robots can be usefully deployed, walking into danger zones with balance and haste but no fear.

In 1989 Donnie Wilson and Jeff Cantrell had a revelation. While cleaning an oil spill in a pond with vacuum trucks in southern Illinois they noticed how oil clung to the sides of a 5-gallon bucket (displaying the same property that makes grease stick to Tupperware). The next year Wilson and Cantrell founded Elastec (now called Elastec/American Marine), to manufacture plastic drum oil skimmers.

In 2010, when BP's Deepwater Horizon well blew, Elastec/American Marine was called to help with the cleanup. The company's skimmers were no match for the 56,000-barrel-a-day gusher. So to keep up with the spill, Wilson's crew used floating booms to corral surface oil and burn it. Watching all that petroleum go up in smoke inspired him and his company to develop a high-volume drum skimmer that could collect more oil, rather than wasting it.

The Deepwater spill also moved Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, to create an X Prize offering $1 million to the first team to recover 2500 gallons of oil a minute from a test slick with an efficiency of 70 percent (no more than 30 percent of the liquid collected could be water). Wilson accelerated Elastec/American Marine's R&D efforts, and within 16 months of the X Prize announcement the company had developed a new grooved disc skimmer that won the prize and shattered the competition requirements, collecting 4670 gallons a minute with nearly 90 percent efficiency. Elastec/American Marine hopes to have units ready to deploy by the end of this year. "We're going to have more oil spills. We need to be able to clean up the messes we make better," Schmidt says. "What the people at Elastec/American Marine have done is incredibly important. It sends a signal that we can do better."

Mark Mahaney

5 of 10

Outsmarting Pain

Next-Generation Award

Innovator: Katherine Bomkamp

In 2006 15-year-old Katherine Bomkamp and her father, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Jeff Bomkamp, went to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for a medical appointment. In the cafeteria, she saw a young wife feeding her husband, who had lost his right arm and both legs. "She was holding the hand he still had," remembers Bomkamp, now a junior at West Virginia University. "I overheard him complaining of pain. That always stuck with me."

That soldier was one of nearly 2 million Americans living with limb loss, 80 percent of whom experience phantom sensations—such as throbbing and burning—coming from their absent limbs.

The next year Bomkamp decided to tackle phantom limb pain for the science fair at her Waldorf, Md., high school. Her prototype prosthesis used battery-powered foot warmers to apply heat to the stump, the way you'd soothe sore muscles—she later found research indicating that heat distracts the brain from pain. She won the science fair and received honorable mention at the 2010 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Bomkamp has continued developing the device. Her most recent prototype has automatic temperature regulation, embedded thermo—resistive wiring, and a solar—powered lithium-ion battery. She received a patent last spring. The next step is to launch human trials.

Bomkamp has come a long way since her high school project, but her inspiration remains the same—helping military amputees get back into the workplace. "I want to make pain one less obstacle that they have to overcome," she says.

What is it? Sequoia, an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer newly installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, Calif. In June it officially became the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

How powerful are we talking about? Sequoia is currently capable of 16.32 petaflops—that's more than 16 quadrillion calculations a second—55 percent faster than Japan's K Computer, which is ranked No. 2, and more than five times faster than China's Tianhe-1A, which surprised the world by taking the top spot in 2010. Sequoia's processing power is roughly equivalent to that of 2 million laptops.

What is it used for? The Department of Energy, which runs LLNL, has a mandate to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, so Sequoia's primary mission is nuclear weapons simulations. But the DOE is also using computers like Sequoia to help U.S. companies do high-speed R&D for complex products such as jet engines and medical research. The goal is to help the country stay competitive in a world where industrial influence matters as much to national security as nukes do.

On the evening of July 11, 2004, Tim Hemmes, a 23-year-old auto-detail-shop owner, tucked his 18-month-old daughter, Jaylei, into bed and roared off for a ride on his new motorcycle. As he pulled away from a stop sign, a deer sprang out. Hemmes swerved, clipped a mailbox, and slammed headfirst into a guardrail. He awoke choking on a ventilator tube, terrified to find he could not lift his arms to scratch his itching nose.

Seven years later Hemmes was invited to participate in a University of Pittsburgh research project aimed at decoding the link between thought and movement. Hemmes enthusiastically agreed and last year made history by operating a robotic arm only with his thoughts.

The science was adapted from work done by Pitt neurobiologist Andrew Schwartz, who spent nearly three decades exploring the brain's role in movement in animal trials. In 2008 his research group trained monkeys with brain microchips to feed themselves using a robotic arm controlled by signals from the creatures' brains. Movement, Schwartz explains, is how we express our thoughts. "The only way I know what's going on between your ears is because you've moved," he says.

To apply this technology to humans, Schwartz teamed up with University of Pittsburgh Medical Center clinician Michael Boninger, physician/engineer Wei Wang, and engineer/surgeon Elizabeth Tyler-Kabara, who attached an electrocorticography (ECoG) grid to Hemmes's brain surface. Wang then translated the electrical signals generated by Hemmes's thoughts into computer code. The researchers hooked his implant to a robotic arm developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (which itself won a 2007 Breakthrough Award). Hemmes moved the robotic arm in three dimensions, giving Wang a slow but determined high-five.

The team's ultimate goal is to embed sensors in the robotic arm that can send signals back to the brain, allowing subjects to "feel" whether an object the arm touches is hot, cold, soft, hard, heavy, or light. Hemmes has an even more ambitious but scientifically feasible goal. "I want to move my own arms, not just a robotic arm," he says. If that happens, the first thing he'll do is hug his daughter.

[A] Thought To touch the apple, the patient imagines a simple action, such as flexing a thumb, to move the arm in a single direction.

[B] Signal Pickup A postage-stamp-size implant picks up electrical activity generated by the thought and sends the signals to a computer.

[C] Interpretation A computer program parses signals from the chip and, once it picks up on specific activity patterns, sends movement data to the arm.

[D] Action The patient can move the arm in any direction by combining multiple thoughts—flexing a thumb while bending an elbow—guiding the arm toward the apple.

Martin Laksman

8 of 10

Peering Around Corners

CORNAR Camera

Innovators: Ramesh Raskar, Andreas Velten, MIT Media Lab

Through two centuries of technological change, one limitation of photography has remained constant: A camera can only capture images in its line of sight. But now a team of university researchers led by MIT Media Lab professor Ramesh Raskar has built a camera that sees around corners. The CORNAR system bounces high-speed laser pulses off any opaque surface, such as a door or wall. These pulses then reflect off the subject and bounce back to a camera that records incoming light in picosecond intervals. The system measures and triangulates distance based on this time-of-flight data, creating a point cloud that visually represents the objects in the other room. Essentially the camera measures and interprets reflected echoes of light.

"For many people, being able to see around corners has been this science-fiction dream scenario," says longtime New York University computer science professor Ken Perlin, who was not involved in the research. "Well, dream or nightmare, depending on how people use it."

[A] Laser A beam is reflected off the door, scattering light into the room.

[B] Camera Light reflects off subject and bounces back to camera, which records time-of-flight data.

What is it? An engineered metal mesh that is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam packing peanuts. It can be compressed by up to 50 percent and bounce perfectly back into shape. The technology was developed by a team from the Malibu-based HRL Laboratories, along with researchers from Caltech and the University of California, Irvine.

How is it made? The basic structure is made when beams of UV light are shot into a light-sensitive liquid resin that hardens into a lattice structure. This is similar to the two-dimensional photolithographic process used to create microchips but done in three dimensions. The resin lattice is coated with a thin film of metal, the resin is then dissolved away.

What can it do? The resulting metal mesh is hollow and light, like bird bones, yet structurally robust. It can be used as a cushioning or insulating material in cars or aircraft, and it has potential applications in the medical field as a possible scaffold for new bone growth.

NASA

10 of 10

Breaking Through the Heliopause

Mechanical Lifetime Achievement Award

Voyager 1 & 2

Innovators: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

In 1977 NASA launched twin Voyager spacecraft to take advantage of a rare alignment of the solar system's gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) that would allow both craft to swing past all four planets in a single trajectory. Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory originally made plans for a 12-year mission. But by 1972 budget woes had withered their planetary grand tour to a five-year flight. Thirty-five years later, both probes are still sending back data, and within the next couple of years Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will exit the farthest bounds of the solar system. Ed Stone, who has been JPL's project scientist for the Voyager program for four decades, is awed by the prospect of the probes entering interstellar space. "We have an object made by the human race that's traveling between the stars," he says. "It's not science fiction anymore. It's real."

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